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rorshacked across them. She felt deftly around his jeans pockets, although she knew no one would be stupid enough to leave Peter’s personal effects on him. But she hoped anyway; a train ticket, a talisman, a quarter, something to place Peter on this plane, at the Laundromat, the bar.
    Lincoln closed her eyes and tried to imagine this faceless man in town, maybe, by the roadhouse where Harmon played darts. Did any of Harmon’s friends have sunken chests and dark, hairy arms? She could imagine Harmon getting into a fight in the parking lot, shifting his weight from one foot to another before he took a swing, the momentum of weight in his body mass running through Peter’s like a Mac truck. Peter was probably innocent, a victim of Harmon’s paranoia, much the same way Lincoln and her mother were at times. But could Harmon kill Peter, take a tire iron or whatever it was he grabbed, and beat Peter’s face out of memory? And would he still see it at night while he was trying to sleep, like a ghost from the Dickens’ tale, transparent over the bed?
    â€œI don’t like him, either,” Lincoln said to Peter, her knees hiked up to her face. “He’s a fucking asshole. You should have carried a gun. That’s the only way he would have respected you.”
    Sometimes when neither Harmon or her mother were home, Lincoln would go into her mother’s room, take the gunbox from where Harmon had kept it under bed, the key on the nighttable, and hold the gun with both hands, aiming at dirty piles of his clothes, her mother’s pile of celebrity magazines, her hairbrush and lipstick. Sometimes she would jump on her mother’s bed, legs wide, and point the gun at herself in the mirror, staring down her own eyes, daring to shoot. She would laugh if Harmon came home early, like he did now and then, and she imagined his expression as his skull took the bullet. And she would burn the body so that not a trace of him, except for some pitiful dust, was left behind.
    A few days later, Peter had begun to smell. Even as Lincoln had unlearned how to smell, Peter’s decay was too acrid and foul and noxious. A smell she could not unlearn. Lincoln breathed into the sleeve of her sweatshirt as she undid his belt buckle and coaxed it out of his pants. It was smaller, softer than Harmon’s of course, and discolored and slightly maggoty. She withdrew her hand quickly and examined it. How many bodies had it entered, how many children did it create? Children that may not have even wanted to be here, not given a choice as to whether to be a body or just an unspoken thought, beautiful, free potential.
    Lincoln stood up and dug her foot deep into Peter’s member. Liquid so dark it was almost black shot out, along with pus and maggots. She stomped hard on it repeatedly, until it was a donut without jelly. But Peter did not feel it, she knew, and she did not either, anymore. Or so she thought. It began first as a slight pressure on the bottom of her foot, a slight ache where she overextended her knee pushing into Peter. She walked back to the trailer, a pot of boiling water in her heart. By the time she got home it had bubbled over, and after she squirted her sneakers she pointed the hose toward herself, letting the cold pressure dull her hot, sticky face.
    There was a news item the next day. An unidentified body had been found behind the trailer park in which Lincoln lived. An unbearable odor had wafted into the trailer park, and someone had called the park service, fearing a dead animal was in the woods. Lincoln watched footage of the cloaked body being removed by the authorities, and she knew she would never go into the woods again. She imagined herself in the bag, clinging to the body, or maybe just her own body, zipped into plastic and placed within a heavy metal drawer, where it would later be touched and dissected for clues, but not clues about Lincoln, rather Lincoln’s body, its time of death